Intro to ZBrush 009 - Brush Basics! Surface properties, buildup, smoothing, hard surface, and more!!

so now we're finally getting somewhere we've learned geometry and resolution we've got some dynamesh going now let's learn how to manipulate our meshes a little bit better we've already entered ourselves in space we've got our floor plane here so essentially we've got a head sitting on a floor we're looking z forward this blue line is forward we can also use our cam view up here as an indicator and once you're oriented you don't need you know these visual representations you can turn the floor off and if you're not accustomed to like going up here and navigating which generally speaking i'm not you can go in here to preferences go in here to cam view and just turn that cam view off if you want if you never want to see it on just turn cam view off and again go up here to config and just hit store config and now cam view won't be on unless you specifically go in here and say turn my cam view on while we're talking about cam view real quick you can go ahead and make the size bigger or smaller you can go in here next and choose a different cam view you can also make custom cam views but for now what i'm going to do is just turn the cam view off and we'll go ahead and just store that config so again to orient yourself in space without the cam view you can just quickly turn the floor on make sure your blue line is forward you're sitting on top of the floor plane here and you're good to go now we've already touched on this a bit but let's back up and we'll start from the beginning we already have our divider double clicked over here these little double arrows here so i'm going to take this transform menu click the white button take the brush menu and finally dock that over here to the left incidentally if i always want zbrush to open up just like i have it again preferences store config okay and now when i open up zbrush this document you'll already be open my brush menu will be over here my tool menu will be over here and i can get started so now by default when you're in zbrush your standard brush again with the dot stroke is probably going to be what you start with and it's a good brush to talk about basic brush behavior let's zoom in a little bit on our mesh here and if we just start sculpting on our mesh the default behavior is for it to kind of push along the surface that exists so you can see as we start sculpting again we can go up here to the draw size make our draw size bigger and because we're using a tablet we have tablet pressure so we're able to kind of you can just barely press on your tablet and get a very soft stroke or you can press very hard on your tablet and it'll really affect your mesh but again we're using by default standard brush has z adds selected up here what that's telling zbrush is for this brush go ahead and push away from the surface normal if i go up here and turn on z sub and i push on my mesh that's going to cut in now instead of always constantly having to go up here and do z add z sub all the time the better way to do that is to have z add just turned on and that's the default behavior so we're going to go through here and we'll start sculpting our head and then if i want to cut into my mesh i'm going to hold down the alt key when i do that you're going to see on my cursor there there's a little minus sign that's giving you a visual indication that we're actually going to push in to our object we're using the alternative or z sub without having to go up there and actually push the z sub button now remember we have dynamesh turned on so as i'm going through here if i turn on polyframe you know these these polygons are getting a little bit twisted just ctrl drag in your document and it'll redistribute that geometry so we've got the standard brush we're using z add and z sub by holding down alt to cut in and letting go of alt to kind of sculpt out away from our mesh here and there's another one here if you hold down shift the cursor is going to turn blue and you're also going to notice up here in your brush palette it's going to switch from your standard brush to the smooth brush now there's a lot of different smooth brushes you can choose from just like there's a lot of different brushes you can choose from but the default smooth brush if you just hold down shift and just drag over your mesh you're going to see it's going to essentially smooth those verts that make up your mesh again if we turn on the polyframe and zoom in all we're doing is manipulating all of these points edges and faces that make up this object so again we can sculpt out we can hold down alt the sculpt in control drag to re-dynamesh and then hold down shift to smooth now when i say hold down shift to smooth what i mean is hold down shift and then touch your mesh and that will do a mesh smooth now if you hold down shift start smoothing and let go of shift but continue to kind of robe the tablet so it affects your mesh that's going to do a secondary smooth algorithm where it kind of pushes the points across the volume that you have that can come in handy if you come into any areas where your mesh doesn't smooth very predictably or if you don't want to smooth the volume you can see if i hold down shift and smooth it kind of really melts the forms of your mesh if you hit ctrl z hold down shift and then let go of shift and can you smoothing you're going to see it redistributes or smooths the points over the existing volumes so it'll still smooth but still maintain your volumes however if you tap on your mesh first and start sculpting and then hold down shift what you're going to see is there's a line that gets drawn out if i let go of shift it's going to basically shoot that brush back to that point this is just an easy way let's hit ctrl z let me make my brush size really small and i'm also going to take my z intensity and crank that up so now when i sculpt with this you're going to see it gives me a very intense stroke if i turn my z intensity down and do the exact same thing gives me a very light stroke now of course you can also use your tablet pressure so if you just barely touch your tablet it'll give you a light stroke and then if you barely touch your tablet and then kind of lean in on your tablet it'll go from light to heavy but it's going to max out at about that much if i take my z intensity and crank it up to 100 and then go very light stroked a very heavy stroke you're going to see it starts out kind of heavy and then gets really heavy and kind of caps out of that much so z intensity is a way where you can control how much of your geometry is displaced when you're using that brush generally speaking i'll keep this at about 30 for my standard brush now we've talked about basic standard brush and of course the smooth brush which is basically just holding down shift when you're using any brush you can smooth your mesh there's a couple really useful brushes that you probably want to add your arsenal you may be thinking well i've got a lot of brushes in here if i just hit the b key under my keyboard these are just default brushes that get loaded into the zbrush as well as if we hit the comma key in our keyboard and go to the brush tab there's even more brushes in here you can choose from but again we're starting out simple we're just getting used to the basics of zbrush so for our standard brush this is a really good one for kind of carving in and sculpting out our mesh here and again you can tap s on your keyboard to bring up your draw size hold down shift to smooth hold down alt to carve in but let's say we wanted to like pull out kind of a jaw shape right now the face kind of follows the trajectory of that sphere and our face just kind of melts off here a good brush for this is to hit b m v that goes into our move brush so we hold down shift and snap this to the side let's make our brush size let's tap s to make our brush size bigger i'm going to take this whole bottom part of the face and just pull it out into kind of a face shape so now you can see i can go through and very quickly start manipulating very large portions of our mesh here and again you can tap s to make your draw size smaller and go up here to your draw size and you can manipulate smaller areas of your mesh and then you can also tap s to make your draw size even larger and again you're always working in the round because this is 3d so you want to kind of go through and evaluate your mesh from all sides and there we have a basic face so now what we can do is we can go back to our standard brush b s t and you can also notice as you're choosing new brushes out of here you can go through here in this brush palette and just like when we were making or selecting new tools it's kind of piling them up over here same thing in your brush palette if you want to choose the move brush just go over here and tap the small move standard brush they're all right here so we'll go ahead and tap the standard brush here again we can hold down alt so just using our standard brush letting go of alt holding down alt tapping s to increase our brush size going over here to our move brush and then because we have geometry dynamesh ctrl drag to redistribute our geometry you can very quickly start fleshing out a face now similar to the standard brush there's another brush i like to use and hit b d and there's a damn standard brush in here essentially what that introduces is the idea of an alpha so it's a standard brush with a dot stroke but now we have an alpha in here so if we go through here let's make our draw size a little bit bigger by tapping s and then bringing our draw size up now when we go through here let's say we want to kind of put a fold around the nose maybe you start drawing a mouth in here you're going to see i get a much finer line so here's my standard brush and if i go to the damian standard brush there's no alpha in there go to damien standard and go through here you're going to see i get a much finer line now there's some other brush settings that are happening in here but essentially if we undo that both of those we go back into our standard brush let's go into our alpha here there's actually the standard damian standard brush alpha sitting in here but you can also see you've got a bunch more alphas in here but if we choose that brush alpha and then use the standard brush and on this one we want to hold down alt by default it's z add you hold down alt you're going to see it kind of punches in and you're also going to see as i'm using this one it kind of leaves dots behind if you want to change that i will skip ahead a little bit you go in here to stroke open up your lazy mouse and change this lazy step to like .05 very small number and that'll give you that result now something important to notice here uh with standard brush the default is z add so you're gonna see when i use this it pulls out by default however when i go to the damian standard brush or damn standard for short and i use that you're going to see z sub is on by default and that's totally fine depending on the type of brush you make the default behavior may be z sub when most people use damien standard they probably go through here and want to cut in with their damian standard and that's not to say you can't go in here and hold down alt and kind of pull up to a ridge if you wanted to for example on the sides of the nose here or on the cheekbones but again most people when using the damian standard brush are probably going to cut in first and then use alt as an alternate method to kind of carve in now you're going to notice when i'm holding down alt i pulled up a ridge and i can go back to my standard brush and i can build up to this ridge of course we need to reset this one if you want you can go in here to brush down here at the bottom say reset current brush that'll bring the standard brush back to its default and now we can use this to kind of build up to that ridge another really good brush for building up forms if we hit b c l that's the clay brush so we go back up here you're gonna see we have clay brush available for us and we can actually go through here and this is a good brush again for just building up nice volumes through here so instead of using the standard brush this one's a little broader and just like any other brush you can hold down alt in this case it's going to dig in so we're going to go through here with our clay brush we're just going to kind of go through and build up some volumes and hold down up alt to kind of take some volumes down and again right along this ridge here you can either build up the nose or again hold down alt and knock that back now a similar brush to the clay brush if you hit b c you see we have a bunch of clay brushes in here and there's a clay buildups right next to there so bcb and also hit your comma key again like we mentioned there's other brushes in here we cares we can't cover all these brushes i'm going to give you the basics to kind of get started with but even in here there's multiple clay brushes that you can kind of play around with but let's go ahead and enter comma key clay buildup is similar to the clay brush but it has a square alpha so we've kind of touched a little bit on alphas before with our damian standard brush and what the alpha does is essentially turn it from if we turn this alpha off it's kind of got a soft round fall off turn the alpha on now it has a more controlled build up again because we're using that square alpha to kind of control that brush stroke so you can use this to kind of go through and build up forms as well or hold down alt and knock back forms go through here on the side and maybe use this to kind of build up a little bit of a jaw here and of course we can always go back in here and hold down shift to smooth all this back out and also remember you can always go back into your move brush and make pretty drastic changes if this jaw is a little bit intense for you go through here hold down tap s to go in your brush size or go up here to your draw size here you go through and you make again some fairly drastic changes you know we can go from kind of an angry brow to more of a pensive look you can bring this jaw way in we can make this mouth size much more smaller and pinched we can go from kind of a melancholy face to a little bit more of a happy face just by using that move brush similar to the move brush and this is one we've touched on just a bit hit bsh to go into your snake hook brush and this one's going to allow you to kind of pull out as you go but it'll also act as an alternative for the move brush in fact some people prefer to use the snake hook brush this gives you a little bit more directionality than the move brush might another really fun one let's hit b p i for the pinch brush and you can use this to if you make a brush that's really big you can pinch entire features down so you can go through here and you can kind of pinch this nose down pinch this mouth down and interestingly enough this alt when you hold down alt with the pen brush doesn't really seem to change the behavior all that much so generally speaking the pinch brush is just going to draw verts together now you can do this over broad areas like we can pinch this entire nose section just by making the brush size large or if you want to make the brush size very large you can pinch the entire face in or you can make it small and you can pinch right along this edge here and kind of define borders of volumes now when you do that if you turn on the poly frame you're going to see we are stressing that geometry criter quite a bit but of course you can just control drag re-dynamesh your mesh and that will redistribute your geometry now at that point if i hit ctrl z you're gonna see we have some nice detail built in you may feel at this point to go ahead and say hey you know what let's keep some of that resolution in my face we'll put this up to like 200 control drag and now we can maintain some of that detail speaking of cleaning up borders we can also go in here hit b h p and that's your h polish brush what that's going to do is allow you to kind of run your brush across a surface of a mesh and really kind of polish that surface now there is an alternative here so if you hold down alt that will kind of pull out toward a surface and if you let go evolved it'll push in so if you see yourself kind of getting towards an edge and you're using alt and it's starting to cut into this side consider holding down alt and that will polish up to that surface so what i do with the h polish brush is let go of alt and hold down alt and kind of alternate between those to get the effect that i want again i can go down here and i can hold down alt and if i just can't quite get that form i was looking for i can switch back to that damien standard brush go through here and cut this in and then hold down alt to kind of pull along a ridge go back to our clay brush and kind of build out to those forms again and then head back into our h-polish brush and define those planes again holding down alt and letting go of alt and very quickly you can start again really defining where these forms go now getting a little bit into these brush modifiers here if you go into well none of the brush modifiers necessarily but brush samples you're going to see there's a preserve edge on the h polish now there's another brush that kind of complements the h polish brush let's go to b t d that's trim dynamic and on this one you're going to see preserve edge is set to 1. so if i switch between h polish and trim dynamic here you're going to see preserve edge goes way up on h polish and what that's doing is allowing this brush to see an edge while you're sculpting and go you know what i'm going to preserve that edge as i'm going through in sculpting i'm going to make sure if i see an edge i'm going to try to preserve it and that's allows this h-polish brush to really go through and again define these angle changes on these forms trim dynamic has preserve edge set to one and you're going to see if i go along this edge with trim dynamic it's going to bevel it right in it's not going to preserve any edges but it will allow you to go across those edges and define a new form or a new plane change which you can now go in with your h polish brush and refine that new plane change so now the h polish brush is going to see two new edges this one at the top and this one at the bottom and you can now polish in between those so this is another really good way trim dynamic and h-polish and damien standard to go through here and start again defining where changes are going through and defining where your volumes are using your clay brush to go through and kind of build up forms or your clay buildup or holding down alt to kind of dig in using your damian standard or your standard brush to dig in using your move brush or your snake hook brush to go through here and move your volumes around and again you can always tap s and re try out your draw size so you can affect larger areas of your mesh or bring this into attack to affect smaller areas hold down shift to smooth out if you want to smooth along these edges again just hold down shift put a nice smooth along here let's say you wanted to define those planes but then maybe go through and soften these out maybe go ahead through here with your trim dynamic kind of knock these edges back you've already found your planes and now you want to refine them a bit more and then of course you can always go back in here in your standard brush hold down alt and kind of start pushing that inwards and also remember like say you're using the clay buildup if you want to really crank up with that z intensity that'll really go through and make plane changes if you want to you can also turn down that z intensity and kind of go across the forms and use this as a way to kind of softly and gently build up volumes and even when you're using your smooth brush if you go through here and you smooth and it's like oh it's smoothing too much you can hold down shift and then bring your z intensity down and now you'll smooth just a little bit less you can also use your tablet pressure to kind of put a little feather touch on that smooth but always remember when you hold down shift this is going to give you access to your smooth intensities so you can go through here and you know keep this up at 100 or drop this down to a lower number there now you may notice as you're using these brushes and you hover over this you're going to see there's a base type so the clay buildup and the clay brushes are all base type clay the standard brush and the dam standard brush or the damian standard brush are both base type standard so those are the kind of the parent or the archetype brushes that all these brushes are based off of and like i said before there's a ton of brushes in here there's all sorts of really crazy cool things you can do but that should be enough to get you started you'd be surprised what you can make with just these brushes a little bit of dynamesh and just having a little bit of fun in zbrush

Channel: Michael Pavlovich

Views: 7,976

Keywords: ZBrush, ZBrush Intro, ZBrush tutorial, zbrush for beginners, zbrush basics, zbrush brushes, zbrush brush settings, zbrush pressure sensitivity, zbrush zadd, zbrush zsub, zbrush smoothing, zbrush shift straight line, zbrush lightbox brushes, zbrush move brush, zbrush pinch brush, zbrush standard brush, zbrush hpolish, zbrush hard surface sculpting, zbrush hard surface brushes, zbrush trim dynamnic, zbrush zintensity, zbrush brush size

Id: KVLDJ8bpy0s

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 19 2021